The Mail

Letters from our readers.

Endangered Languages

We read with interest Judith Thurman’s piece on attempts to save dying languages (“A Loss for Words,” March 30th). There’s a quip among workers in New England nursing homes that goes, “They come in speaking English, and they go out speaking gibberish.” Most often, this is not a result of the patient’s presumed dementia but, rather, the failure of these workers to recognize Yiddish, Canadian French, Lithuanian, Passamaquoddy-Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, and other languages that Americans rarely hear. To an astonishing extent, heritage languages spoken at an early age are not forgotten. They are repressed because of stigma or trauma associated with the loss of communities, politely referred to as “assimilation.” Like the former Selk’nam speaker in Thurman’s article, who begins remembering words and phrases with a little encouragement, many people who come through our organization, Speaking Place, have either spontaneously or with hard work regained languages that had been lost since childhood. Often these people are “fluent comprehenders,” who understand their language but cannot speak it. They represent one of the best chances for reviving lost languages by reëstablishing traditional lines of transmission.

Ben Levine and Julia Schulz

Directors, Speaking Place

Rockland, Maine

Thurman’s piece corrals vivid examples of endangered languages and a wide variety of speakers. As a linguist who specializes in Chinese and in language politics, I want to note that, though Chinese minorities face injustices, and their experiences at local schools are often overwhelmed by ethnic-Han chauvinism, China’s language policy and bilingual-education programs are far more generous than anything the United States has implemented. Language equality is enshrined in the Chinese constitution, while several American states ban bilingual education. For now, Russia protects language rights; it is former Soviet states, like Latvia and Estonia, that have created monolingual language-discrimination policies, which are aimed mostly against ethnic Russians.

Mary Erbaugh, Ph.D.

Center for Asian and Pacific Studies,

University of Oregon

Eugene, Ore.

Left Unstated

James Surowiecki, in his column about Puerto Rico, observes that the territory confronts severe economic problems, and argues that a renewed focus on tourism could help “reinvent” its economy (“The Puerto Rican Problem,” April 6th). I represent Puerto Rico in Congress. It is important to understand that Puerto Rico’s economy has lagged far behind those of the fifty states for decades, and it is the states—not foreign countries—that serve as the proper point of comparison. Puerto Rico’s unemployment rate has been higher than that of every state since at least the nineteen-seventies, when the federal government began collecting those statistics. The average household income in Puerto Rico has been about one-third of the U.S. national average. The root cause of these enduring problems is our political status. My constituents cannot vote for President, and, while I represent them in the House, I cannot vote on bills. Each year, Puerto Rico loses out on billions of dollars in federal spending and tax credits that Congress sends to the states. To compensate for the shortfall in federal funding, Puerto Rico’s government has borrowed heavily in the bond market, leading to the excessive debt to which Surowiecki refers. To overcome its economic challenges, Puerto Rico must become a state.

Rep. Pedro R. Pierluisi

Washington, D.C.

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